Ron DeSantis has taken national leadership in his effort to stamp out drag queens. I have never been to a drag queen brunch or a drag queen library story hour, but they seem to be popular in some places, especially in Florida. And DeSantis won’t have it! Apparently, parents bring their children to these events, but they don’t have the “parental right” to do it in DeSantisland.
Floridians in the performing arts are worried that DeSantis will send his morality police to close them down next, if they stage a play like “Mrs. Doubtfire.” As it happens, a drag musical called “Kinky Boots” recently opened in Orlando; it was a huge hit on Broadway. Will DeSantis close it down? Will he assign undercover agents to make sure that no parents bring children with them?
Amanda Rosa writes in the Miami Herald:
Before there was “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and drag brunch in Wynwood, there was Shakespeare.
Women were not allowed to perform on stage in England until 1660, which meant that men in wigs and dresses would depict female characters in Shakespeare’s most iconic plays.
In modern theater, a strong tradition of drag on stage remains, from Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray” to Mrs. Trunchbull in “Matilda” to Angel in “Rent.”
Drag, particularly in the presence of children, is the latest target in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ onslaught against what he calls “woke ideology.”
As the state government reprimands businesses and venues that have hosted drag shows where children were present, South Florida performance arts groups have watched with unease.
Conservative politicians’ increasingly inflammatory rhetoric and legislation targeting the LGBTQ community may have a chilling effect. Members of South Florida’s theater scene question what the implications may be for performances that include LGBTQ characters, actors in drag or themes that the state government may find offensive.
Drag artists wonder if venues that have hosted their shows in the past may now view them as a liability. And some worry that theater may be the next battleground in DeSantis’ culture war….
The Herald reached out to several performing arts groups and venues for this report. One theater organization, which has LGBTQ cast members, declined to speak on the record out of fear of retaliation.
Meltzer said that some in the local theater scene have reservations about sharing their concerns with the press, himself included. “People are scared,” Meltzer said. “And that shows you everything that you need to know about what’s really going on…
Whether DeSantis likes it or not, drag has cemented itself into mainstream pop culture. And touring productions that feature drag are coming to South Florida. Pop icon Madonna, a vocal LGBTQ ally, is bringing her world tour to the Miami-Dade Arena with special guest, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” winner and comedian Bob the Drag Queen. Madonna recently announced the addition of more tour dates, including a stop in Tennessee to protest the state’s “drag ban” law. The arena declined to comment for this story.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/performing-arts/article273794115.html#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good morning Diane and everyone,
Here in upstate NY, we have an issue going on right now with a drag queen story hour for children at a public library.
https://www.news10.com/news/north-country/drag-storytime-turns-controversial-in-lake-luzerne/
One more ultra-liberal circular firing squad delivering a treasure trove of ammunition to far right fascists of the GOP. Do they really need one more sound bite to drive independents and center-right democrats away?
Important reminder: Toddlers, pre-schoolers, and young children are not mini adults. Why do so many ignore brain development and maturity issues?
Are you in the right place? You willingly accept every mischaracterization, lie, and overblown claim as reasons “independents and center-right democrats (sic) [are driven] away?” Seriously. The presence of a certain individual automatically “sexualizes children”? They should just accept these things, move on, or else be drawn into an “ultra-liberal circular firing squad”? You know, one of the tired tropes used for centuries was that old Jewish men were child molesters. You’ve just replaced the object of fear to hate.
DeSantis’ war on drag queens is another distraction that is intended to appease his right wing base. People in Florida should be more concerned with what he is doing behind the scenes to further restrict voting and the Florida Sunshine Laws. DeSantis does not want the public to know what he is up to behind the scenes. While DeSantis wages his culture wars in front of the media, the man secretly works in the dark to unravel democracy.
Residents of the state should know that DeSantis’ culture wars are costing the taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in lawsuits. The lawsuits stem from “restricting abortion access, redistricting, election measures, the state’s anti-riot act and fights over Covid 19 policies.” DeSantis is proposing the death penalty for child rapists without consensus of all twelve jurors. In enacted, this would spur another round of costly litigation.
Drag queens are harmless entertainment. It is unfortunate that they have become a victims of DeSantis’ culture wars. If he arrests after them, I hope the ACLU will come to their defense.
I was going to say this. DeSanta Clause knows that any publicity is good. Tie up the legislative process and hide all the crap you are up to.
@retired teacher — Exactly! “No need to pay attention to the man behind the curtain!” What laws were made while you slept? All these stuff is theater/distractions/diversions. What we should be concerned about (Michael Moore always said this) is what judges are being appointed. Uh, can you say Supreme Court where they all said, “Roe v. Wade” — never touch it.
RT-“ Drag queens are harmless entertainment. ”
During my Nieces bachelorette weekend in Nashville, we attended a breakfast hosted by Drag Queens. They were gracious hosts and the food was outstanding. They kept us entertained throughout the morning. It was definitely the highlight of the weekend for me.
We still reminisce about the continuous laughter from the group. It would be a loss if they were unable to offer this opportunity in the future.
I have long loved theatre. When I was a young man, up until my thirties, I did a LOT of acting, and I have been a director, drama coach, playwright, screenwriter, and teacher of theatre and film at various times throughout my life. A couple years ago, I volunteered to do some work on stage sets at a local theatre company. Then, when one of the actors dropped out of the play that was underway, I was recruited to take his part. Fine. It was fun. But this was in Flor-uh-duh, where events often take a strange turn.
First, one day I was backstage painting a scrim. Next to me was another local, who had climbed a ladder to hang a light when, out of his back pocket fell his handgun, which dropped 15 feet or so and clattered to the stage. Well. How about that. This is Flor-uh-duh, in which random people are packing. Recently, in this stage, one of the workers slipped and fell on the gravel at a house construction site, and his gun accidentally went off and shot and killed a fellow worker up on the rooftop.
Second, I was warned by fellow actors to be mum about LGBTQ+ issues around the theater’s director, who was virulently anti LGBTQ+. This woman, who called all the shots at this small theatre company and appointed herself to direct all the plays, had stopped speaking to or seeing her own sister when the sister came out as lesbian. That seemed totally bizarre to me. An anti-LGBTQ+ THEATRE PERSON sounded, to me, like a a Jewish Nazi or a field mouse with a love for feral cats.
But there are, of course, such bizarre creatures. Consider, for example, former White House Propaganda Minister and creator of policies to separate babies from their parents, Stephen “Goebbels” Miller. When I was first told of this director’s opinions, I said, “But doesn’t she understand that this is a theatre company and ALMOST EVERYONE HERE is LGBTQ+ or as fluid as a river?” Evidently not. People attached to the company were so afraid of this woman that they tried to hide these things from her so that she would continue to cast them.
And I thought of Texas, back in my textbook editing and writing days, where the local Christian version of the Taliban morality police had suggested at several textbook adoption hearings banning “queer authors” from all K-12 literature textbooks. Which would have made for some pretty thin literature textbooks. There would be in them, for example, and in no particular order, NO James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Oscar Wilde, Federico Garcia Lorca, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Carson McCullers, E. M. Forster, Gore Vidal, Horace, Walter Pater, Lord Byron, Harvey Fierstein, Paul Goodman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Noel Coward, Willa Cather, Petronius, Thronton Wilder, Evelyn Waugh, Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood, Susan Sontag, Jeanette Winterson, Nikolai Gogol, Hilda Doolittle, Edna St. Vincent Millary, Elizabeth Bishop, Sarah Orne Jewett, David Sedaris, Edith Sitwell, Maurice Sendak, Arthur Rimbault, Mary Renault, Plato, Plutarch, Audre Lorde, Paul Verlaine, Stephen Spender, A. E. Housman, Thomas Mann, Aphra Behn, James Merrill, Marguerie Yourcenar, Terrance McNally, Virgil, Lytton Strachey, Michel Foucault, Samuel Delany, Jeremy Bentham, Anais Nin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Howard Sturgis, Catullus, Adrienne Rich, John Donne, Colette, Daphne du Maurier, George Santayana, Mary Sarton, Frank O’Hara, Joe Orton, Wilfred Owen, Fran Lebowitz, Andre Gide, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Walker, Sir Francis Bacon, Virginia Woolf, Lord Tennyson, Alan Locke, Jack Kerouac, Countee Cullen, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Yukio Mishima, F. O. Mattheissen, D. H. Lawrence, John Milton, Sara Teasdale, Patricia Highsmith, Angela Davis, Thomas Gray, Sappho, Edward Albee, Hans Christian Andersen, Jean Genet, John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Honore de Balzac, Djuna barnes, Roland Barthes, John Cheever, Helene Cixous.
Which might be fine with the likes of DeStalinist and the many nonreaders among Repugnican standouts these days. What would be left? The collected poems of Jerry Fallwell? The essays on what a man he is of Josh Hawley? The treatises in metaphysics and epistemology of Ted Cruz and Margorie Taylor Greene?
The alternative readings are indeed depressing!
IKR?
What did you call it when a left-leaning politician crossed Jerry Fallwell?
Crossing the rube-con.
cx: Recently, in this state
Surly Mark Twain is one of their “OK” authors (Missouri guy and all)…. Oops!
Huckleberry Finn dressed as a girl to hear the gossip about Jim and him) – Can’t teach that – it’s diversity, diversity training, and queer all in one chapter
Lots of that diversity training in Sam Clemens’s work! I recently saw a great picture of him, btw, on the stage with Booker T. Washington at an event to raise money for schools for African Americans. Twain was one of the good guys.
Don’t forget Twain’s attempts to call out the Debacle in Congo at a time when Docial Farwinism ruled the day.
Thanks for reminding us of how many original thinkers, writers and artists come from the LGBTQ community. We need to judge people by the content of their character, not their sexual or gender orientation.
Young people are discovering that these don’t have to be fixed, immutable matters, and that discovery is a new birth of freedom. It’s a tectonic cultural shift. The troglodytes don’t understand that this is a general cultural shift, and so they look around for teachers to blame. LOL. Morons. Some of them, ofc, simply do that because it creates an Emmanuel Goldstein to parade before the rubes in 2-minutes hates.
What will happen eventually, I suspect, is that only a few outliers will identify as strictly heterosexual and homosexual and that gender will be almost universally fluid. Here’s why I’m so sure of that: in every culture, at every time and place, where there were not strict cultural taboos against homosexuality, almost everyone was bisexual. So, you have to be taught, and young people and our popular culture are both saying, now, ___ that.
I have often thought that writers have generally found themselves on the fringes of society. Maybe you have to be on the fringes of society to experience life in a way that creates the deep feelings of a writer.
I think of the tortured Tennyson, so revered in his day by a public which never understood him at all. And I think of authors whose lives have been constant bouts with depression, anxiety, or political repression. Do all great writers live upon the rack?
I suspect that it’s more that EVERYONE has their crosses to bear. The thing that makes a writer connect is that there is universality to their work. People find them, to use the argot of “kids these days,” “relatable.”
I think you are right. I remember teaching creative writing in an alternative school where I began my career. It seemed all the kids had at least one good writing in them, usually the place where life and emotion had collided to produce a poem, story, or essay.
And to think, all were produced by a heterosexual biological occurrence. But seriously, it’s a sad state of affairs that we even feel the compulsion to post lists like this. Another sign the other side is winning.
In the short term. But I do think that a seismic change is occurring among the young.
All these stuff–the DeStalinist crusade against drag–is the death rattle of an era that is passing. It’s the revolt of the hinterlands of the country because the progressive cities have moved way, way past them.
I get you, but I seem to remember being told about the coming Age of Aquarius and we got Reagan. I’m not that confident. The few young conservatives I’ve met are pro-environmental cleanup and preservation, all for LGBT rights and don’t think it’s a big thing, and will vote straight Republican ticket regardless.
Greg: our generation went from Gimmie Shelter to Tax shelter under the duress of the the late 70s. Maybe this group otherwise.
Greg, polls taken during the Vietnam War showed that the MAJORITY of adults under 25 supported the war. It was the people 65 and older who opposed it. So, most of the young people were not grooving on free love and cosmic mind expansion at Woodstock. Most were rightwingers. And so it was actually no surprise that these same people grew up to vote for Ronald Raygun.
There’s quite a bit of political science research suggesting that people’s political inclinations are fairly consistent over the lifespan. I expect great things of the kids coming up. The Pew surveys of their opinions are extremely encouraging. What I think we’re going to see, short term, is an ATTEMPT by the Repugnicans to hold back the tide that will, eventually, wash them away.
I’ll take your word for it, but my sources at the Fifth Dimension beg to disagree! But I get it, you are correct. Although not nearly as stylish.
Funny because I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in.
I used to think that, too, Greg. I was a teenager in a university town. A lot of my friends were sons and daughters of faulty. We were almost all hippies and believed that we were in the midst of a revolution and that we were all going to be living on communes and making love not war. But out in the hinterlands (which weren’t very far at all from Bloomington, Indiana), it was still the Middle Ages, and people were dumb as boxes of rocks, which is why crap like “Everything Is Beautiful” and “Spirit in the Sky” was topping the charts.
I would advise against it. It never turns out well at our age.
It reminds me of…”First they came for, then they came for…” I foresee all television shows banned in Florida as well. Nearly every television show (and not limited to), e.g., The Hardy Boys (Hulu); Nancy Drew, All American, Walker (CW); Workin’ Moms (Netflix) feature gay couples (oops, please don’t tell on me). Your Honor (Showtime) as well. Oh, and what about Tyler Perry and Madea? As Bob, I spent my entire teaching career harnessing the arts and nearly every summer going to Summer Arts Institutes where they encouraged us to study our dominate arts discipline and then one that was completely opposite. I performed my first “contemporary arts dance” at Santa Clara University in front of my peers. It was enthralling and to think I kept saying, “Nah, take the easy route.” But, as a teacher, how could I encourage students to take a risk if I wasn’t going to? I do fear for the performing arts as well. Such a shame.
As Bob Shepherd wrote, if a state bans gay actors and writers, it is reduced to cartoons.
Awesome, rcharvet!!! Got a vid to post?
Repugnicans are ALWAYS on the wrong side of history. Consider how much they touted the Vietnam War and the first Iraq War and how almost to a person, now, they say that these were terrible mistakes (and often deny that they approved of them at the time). There hasn’t been a major positive political change in the US for a long, long time that they didn’t vehemently oppose. Social security. Medicare. The Voting Rights Act. Cross-race marriage. Gay marriage.
Backward, superstitious fundamentalist morons of the Greying Old Party: Give it up.
That vid ought to be safe for work. LOL. I look forward to a future when it is.
Please forward to Governor DeSantis.
Haaaa!!!!
John Peter Altgelt was mayor of Chicago in the late 1800s. Altgelt’s America, by Ray Ginger, tells the story of its labor movement, Jane Addams and Hull House, and the political paroxysms that set America on a new course post-reconstruction. It’s subtitle, like most of Ray Ginger’s works, set two ideas against each other. In this case it was “The Lincoln Ideal vs Changing realities”. In a way this is the history of how the Republicans became the party of the business giants of that day in the shadow of their idealistic opposition to the ideals that had birthed the Republican Party.
It is remarkable how periods of time are shaped by new ideas and economic collisions. In every age until now, continual progress toward a goal of freedom and dignity for all has been the fight worth having.
Thanks for that fascinating history lesson, Roy!!! And much love to you and yours!!!!
“In every age until now, continual progress toward a goal of freedom and dignity for all has been the fight worth having.”
Roy,
This was the idea I grew up with. Things would improve from generation to generation because we shared that goal of “freedom and dignity for all.” That dream shattered in 2016…and now we see that one of our two parties doesn’t share that goal.
Thank you, Roy and Diane. And Diane, that’s really beautifully stated. xoxoxoxxo
Diane: In every age until now must have been the way they felt as (quoting my mother) “Hitler was marching across Europe”. I put it that was precisely because of 2016. If we do not push back the tide of truth being the same as belief, we are in deep trouble.
Diane: My older brother told me once that he had grown up thinking that superstition and its mates would vanish in the face of rational thought. He commented on how surprised and disappointed he has been to find that beliefs he thought were archaic seem to persist, even to prosper.
Your brother was like me, believing that the spread of education would lead inevitably to a world of rationality. Superstition and irrational fear seem to be part of human nature.
Noo!! Don’t hurt “Kinky Boots!” It isn’t just a story with drag queens. It’s a beautiful story of accidental friendship and learning…and it’s true! A fuddy-duddy shoe company in England was failing until the owner found a niche market making stiletto heels and hip boots for the sizes and weights of men in drag!! Fantastic musical!! Made me smile and cry…Flori-duh just makes me cry!!
❤ this post!!!!
What’s the difference between Donald Trump and the Hindenburg?
One is a flaming Nazi gasbag, and the other is a dirigible.
How do a carp and Ted Cruz differ?
One is a bottom-dwelling slime-dweller, and the other is a fish.
How do Ron DeStalin and the Taliban differ?
Hmm. Hard to say. Got me there.
cx: bottom-dwelling slime-sucker
I seriously suspect that DeFascist is going to get bit hard in a bodily area that seldom sees sunlight if he runs for president. He may win the MAGA RINO controlled Republican primaries (if the traitor is behind bars by then), but in the general election I think the DeFascist will lose the popular vote by a larger margin than Traitor Trump did in 2020.
Beginning to look that way, huh?
Lloyd: There was a picture I recall that almost laid bare that portion of his anatomy which “seldom sees sunlight.” He has a right to bare arms, you know
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mike-pence-in-pink-boots-ron-desantis-in-a-big-ball-gown-here-s-how-the-rupublicans-instagram-account-uses-ai-art-to-call-out-gop-lawmakers-by-dressing-them-in-drag/ar-AA19QsVV?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=a97a8dde889a455ab285999604d15ab5&ei=31
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this topic! While I personally enjoy attending drag queen events, I understand that not everyone does. However, I don’t believe it’s the government’s place to dictate what types of events are allowed for adults to attend. Let’s hope that the performing arts community in Florida continues to thrive and express themselves freely.